On Urban Cultivation & Soil Quality

A new paper from the Journal of Applied Ecology titled Urban cultivation in allotments maintains soil qualities adversely affected by conventional agriculture outlines how urban gardens maintain higher soil quality (based on soil organic carbon, C:N ratios, and so forth) as compared to conventional agriculture. Thus highlighting the urban agriculture’s capacity “for regulating and supporting ecosystem services upon which we depend”; in particular “that small-scale urban food production can occur without the penalty of soil degradation seen in conventional agriculture”. This is rounded out with a charge to urban planners to “promote more urban own-growing in preference to further intensification of conventional agriculture to meet increasing food demand.”